cataphiles session 1
Inspired heavily by the tunnelers campaign.
Paris, October 6th, 2026, 11:00 AM.
Jean-Pierre, Ingrid, Alain, and Beverley are gathered in the communal space of their shared student accomodation. Their roommate, the affable Miguel Camion ('Mike Truck'), has gone missing, along with the majority of the flat's supply of baguettes and salami. If there's one thing that lad loves it's salami sandwiches.
Heading to ⠀⠀⠀⠀1. Be back in 4hrs or less. Don't tell anyone, especially not my mom.
- Mike's last text to the group chat, a couple days ago.
Ingrid tries to text him, but the messages aren't delivering. The group decide to check out the address. Beverley pays 2 Euros for the light rail, giving her an extra ten minutes to do her makeup.
Twenty minutes later they are outside a shuttered nail salon. Jean-Pierre and Ingrid start hammering on the shutters, while Alain notices there are some baguette crumbs around a manhole. Beverley finds Mike's last location on FindMyFriends as roughly six meters in front of the nail salon, over a day ago. Some guy in the flat above the nail salon tells them to shut the fuck up, he works night shift and is trying to sleep. They question him about Mike Truck. The man rants confusedly about 'students and other trash loitering around the manhole'. They ask what they do with the manhole and he can't seem to answer, so instead spits at them before slamming his window shut.
Alain has levered open the manhole. He seems to have an innate affinity for subterranean spaces. Lots of memories of going near manhole covers or sewer grates, but nothing in his mind speaks to what is beyond them. He shrugs this strange, cold mental void away. Not surprising to have blacked out a few times, he is a raver after all.
He flicks his maglite on to reveal a dry, dusty shaft with an iron ladder. It drops 5 meters to the floor. Are those more baguette crumbs?
Alain feels magnetically drawn to this enigmatic passage. Nobody else seems to think Mike could have actually gone down there, but Ingrid is interested in grabbing some samples for her mineralogy course and Beverley wants to snap some photos for Photography 101. The group heads down.
The ladder descends to a 5 meter landing. Seamless steps and walls hewn from high-quality limestone descend 20m to a T-junction. The group all remark that it is strange how clean and dry it is here -- this definitely ain't a sewer.
The baguette crumbs continue, leading them left at the junction. Their excited chattering echoes up and down what must be a very, very long tunnel. Cold, dry, and unrelentingly dark. The Maglite gives them 50m of visibility in a narrow, unidirectional slice. The stark white walls create a small, reflective corona of light behind them, but there is zero peripheral or backwards vision beyond 5 meters. Spooky.
They hit a T-junction. Ahead, they will need to stoop and crawl; this also seems to be where the baguette crumbs are leading. To their right, a walkable passage curves around out of view. And a Ring doorbell.
It is stuck to the wall with a blob of hot glue. That same glue, seemingly in one single stroke of the glue-gun, has been plastered over the front of it, so that the doorbell button cannot be pressed. A blue light on the front blinks in response to motion, silently letting the group know they are being observed.
Loud bickering occurs as they decide what to do. Ingrid taps on the camera and loudly enquires whether whoever owns the camera has seen Mike Truck. Alain takes out his stanley knife and cuts away some of the glue, then starts hammering the doorbell button. Jean-Pierre withdraws his competitive fencing rapier from its soft carrying case, and Beverley, having been insulted by the French students once more for being an American, has begun to crawl through the tight passage ahead of them.
A click. The Ring doorbell-tone cuts out.
Heavy breathing.
At that moment a blinding light flares up from behind2. The light on the Ring camera shuts off as quickly as it came on, and there is no more noise.
There is a man behind them, holding a torch and a gun. He is middle-aged, with grey lines in his close-cropped haircut. His eyes are bloodshot and he is unshaven. He shakily asks them who the fuck they are, and what this place is. When the party explain in confused fits and starts that they don't really know anything at all, he laughs in frustration before showing them there is no magazine in the gun.
This is Richard Barbet. Three days ago, he was a detective for the Metropolitan police of Paris. Two days ago, he woke up to a phone call from his superintendent, informing him he had been made redundant. Police administrators had been unable to find any records whatsoever of what his role in the police was, or even the name of his assigned department. When Barbet went in that day to collect his things, he found boxes and boxes of blank paper; wiped hard drives; blank Polaroids.
Two days of insomnolent searching began to build the shape of something. What it is, Barbet still, maddeningly, does not know. He can only see that something huge is missing from every record he can think to access, a negative space of impossible proportions. Archives, survey data, websites, even the Dark Web, all dotted with conspicuous voids. One such void led him to an unmarked, unlocked door in a darkened corner of a Metro station. He has been wandering down here for the past hour.
Realising that these slightly vapid students are not the orchestrators of a grand memetic conspiracy, Barbet tells them all this, figuring he has nothing left to lose and perhaps something to gain. The party disclose that they're looking for Mike, who has been missing for a day now. The ex-detective agrees to run a background check on Mike while the party continues spelunking in search of him. He hands them his card and instructs them, in return for this favour, to send him detailed photos and notes of everything they see down here. They also talk him into giving over his empty gun, in case they run into undesirables.
The card contains his name, badge number, and the insignia of the police, but where his assigned agency or department should be, there is instead a perfect, smooth blank space, looking for all the world like it has always been that way. A misprinted batch of cards, perhaps?
As Detective Barbet returns from whence he came, the party successfully traverse the crawlspace at half-speed. A few dozen meters later, they step out into a three-way junction and choose to go right. Sweeps of the Maglite reveal a long, straight corridor with many niches and alcoves along both sides. They can smell salami, and hear soft mewling, and licking.
Beverley inches around the corner of the first alcove with her iPhone torch in one hand and her pepper spray in the other. Jean-Pierre brandishes his rapier. The light lands on a pale quadrupedal body, ribs tenting against mangy skin.
It is a sick and exhausted stray dog, and her litter of six freshly-born puppies. The bitch barely raises her head as the party gather round.
"We're adopting these puppies, right?"
The Catacombs, October 6th, 02:40 PM.